HP will bring its WebOS-based tablet to market early next year, a company executive has stated.
During the PC giant's quarterly earnings conference last night, Todd Bradley, head of the company's Personal Systems Group, said: "Tablet sales and slate sales [were] a big part of the reason we acquired Palm. You'll see us with a …

Does anyone care?

Backing a loser - Slate with Windows

It is strange for a company to hack what must be, by any criteria, a dud.

Without doubt, Android will rule. The toss up for second place will be between Apple and RIM so that leaves fourth place for HP.

These products will be price sensitive which again places HP at a disadvantage as most of it;s products tend towards the high end. As others point out, Apps also will determine the most suitable unit for he intended purpose - quality and not quantity.

Right result, wrong reason

Whist I agree, in terms of sales that the consumer market will be a apple v android battle with the others as also rans. The article says that HP is using PalmOS for its consumer devices, so your comment about windows slate is pointless. If HP make windows slates for corporates, thats a different kettle of fish, where application compatibility (for legacy stuff, think IE6 woes) etc is a bigger issue.

I used Palms happily for years, but they ran into a black hole and (in my opinion) Apple picked up the ease of use friendliness that the old Palm Pilot had that made them so popular 10 years ago (while Apple were floundering) Palm OS was too late into the phone arena, but it may be a contender (albe it not the most popular) in the tablet space.

Why not Android?

It is simple, Google is getting too close to the server business. HP can't support Android, because it would be funding Google, pushing Google further into the ARM based server market. Google is already believed to be running more servers than any single entity in the world and has been working on some groundbreaking projects with servers in shipping containers.

What Windows?

Confused by the comments about apps. The article doesn't say Windows Mobile (or whatever they call it now), unless I'm mistaken? Any decent tablet built on desktop Windows could be pretty strong... by 'decent' I mean it has to not just be Windows with a touch-screen, preferably.